


Great and Awful

by anonymous_sibyl



Series: Mother of All Monsters [1]
Category: Cal Leandros - Rob Thurman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Gen, Genderbending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 19:28:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/613431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_sibyl/pseuds/anonymous_sibyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if the Leandros brothers were sisters?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Great and Awful

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tommygirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tommygirl/gifts).



> Written for [](http://tommygirl.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**tommygirl**](http://tommygirl.dreamwidth.org/) for [](http://fandom-stocking.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://fandom-stocking.dreamwidth.org/)**fandom_stocking** 2012\. Title comes from a description of Echidna in Hesiod's Theogony.  
>  Disclaimer: This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/). None of the media or characters written about in my fanfiction belong to me and I make no profit from these works.

My mother, nurturing sort that she was, named me true. Echidna, mother of all monsters. 

Fine, mom wasn't nurturing, she was a bitch. In the human way. Just like I'm a bitch in the Auphe way. As in broodmare. As in good-ole-mom was right, I really could be the mother of all monsters. Technically, I suppose, I'm a half-bitch. Half-mom and half-Auphe. All monster.

The Auphe are the monsters that scare the other monsters. They're the thought behind Tennyson's "red in tooth and claw" and their blood is my blood. 

Nikola, my sister, taught me that. The Tennyson part. She loves poetry just as much as she loves swords and she pounds on me with both. Improvement, she calls it. I agree with the sword part, but I'd trade the poems for guns any day. She doesn't agree with the other part. To her, their blood is something I can conquer, while our blood, the blood she and I share through the mother we hate, is the bond. 

I wish she was right.

In case it wasn't clear, I'm a creation. An experiment. Mom got it on with an Auphe and little baby Echidna was born, the closest to an Auphe to be born in millenia, and the only female. 

Get that? The only female. The Auphe are a dying breed, with way too many dicks on their dance floor. So they made me. And I'm supposed to make more of them.

Mother of all monsters.

* * *

"So, it's a cat," I say, cutting into Nik's oh-so-fascinating lecture about twelfth century Swahili music and early-twentieth century colonialism.

Nik sighs deeply. "No, Chid, it is not a cat. It's a mngwa."

"Which is...?"

She sighs again. "A very big cat."

"Fine." I finish loading my gun and put it in my holster. "Then let's get some tunafish and go catch us a pussy cat."

"It isn't going to be that simple," she says.

"Good. I don't like simple."

 

I am an ass. I am an ass who should learn to like simple. This mngwa thing is not a cute widdle puddy tat. It isn't even a lion. Its claws are razor sharp, the tears in my favorite leather jacket prove that. And its breath? Ugh! If Nik could smell this she'd never nag me about morning breath again. 

The thing is huge, grey striped like a tabby cat, and the size of one of those ponies other kids had for birthday parties. I always wanted to ride one of those. "Hey, Nik," I call out, "Do you think I could ride this thing?"

"No." She ducks underneath it, slashing at its unprotected belly. "Do not do that, Chid. Do not try to ride the mngwa."

Too late. I'm up the tree and sailing off the branch and over the mngwa before she finishes her lecture. I'm sure there was going to be more, probably about safety or something, but I can't hear her. I land, precariously, and the mngwa doesn't like it. With one hand I grab hold of the fur at its neck and with the other I raise my gun to the back of its head. "A tiger?" I scream out. "In India?" I fire, again and again, and the mngwa falls.

 

It must have fallen on me because when I wake up I hurt. All over. Especially my brain because Nik is lecturing and it seems as if she's been going at it for a long time. 

"Are you awake now, Chid?"

"Um, yeah?"

"Injured?"

"Um, no?"

"Good." She swats me upside the head with more force than is strictly necessary considering I just killed a giant cat monster. "Now, what did you do wrong?"

"I rode a cat? Bareback. Yeah, that's it. I should have had a saddle."

And she swats me again.

"So, not the saddle thing?"

Nik closes her eyes and I'm sure she's doing some Zen meditation thing where she chants "I will not kill my sister" over and over until she believes it.

"India," she says.

I get it now. "Right. Just quoting Monty Python. Hilarious skit. You ever seen it?"

"The mngwa," she says, in the long-suffering tone that usually means I'm going to suffer for a long time, "is from Africa. Tanzania and Kenya, to be exact. Not India."

I think about that for a while, not one-hundred percent sure why I should care. "Colonialism?" I offer up, remembering the pre-fight educational lecture. 

She opens her mouth, then shuts it tight. Opens it again. Shuts it. I'm pretty sure there are going to be new books arriving in our apartment, really boring ones about colonialism in India and in Africa and that I'm going to have to explain it all to her. And I will because she wants me to. Because she wants me to understand and care about people. Because she wants me to be more than a monster.

"Good kill," she says, finally. 

"Yeah, it was," I say. "We should skin it and make a rug."

* * *

The Auphe don't colonize. They don't have a civilization and they don't want ours. Humans and our technologies are nothing to them. What they want is the blood and the chase, the death and the feed.

What they want, truly want, is me. I was made to mother their children, and if I don't go to them willingly, they'll take me. They'll force me.

While I rode that mngwa to its death I didn't worry about any of that. I wondered how many people it had killed, I wondered what long road had brought it to New York, and I wondered how its liver would taste, dripping blood and still warm from its body. 

I can't deny the Auphe in me. 

But Nik can and she does. She teaches me history, tells me we need to learn from it. She trains me to fight and she brings me back from the edge. Without her I'd be a monster. With her I'm almost human.


End file.
